How you can use FOIA to dig into Trump’s business empire, environmental danger, and dubious site downtime

Every week, journalists, researchers, and every day people use public records laws and the Freedom of Information Act to shine light on important (or at least interesting) issues in the most unexpected places. Whether you’re just getting started with public records or are a seasoned document hunters, here’s ideas to help jumpstart your own requesting.

Finding out who is — and isn’t — paying for time on Trump properties

Every week, journalists, researchers, and every day people use public records laws and the Freedom of Information Act to shine light on important (or at least interesting) issues in the most unexpected places. Whether you’re just getting started with public records or are a seasoned document hunters, here’s ideas to help jumpstart your own records work.

While the General Services Administration, which managed the lease, worked to make sure that the president would not personally benefit from the lease, Sonne was able to connect released records with other public data to show the property is owned by a member of the Trump Tower board of directors.

While private companies, like Trump’s, are generally exempt from public records laws, often times their intersection with public bodies is not, and that’s the tactic the reporters used to dig into how business was going.

“We really got lucky here in that the city of Rancho Palos Verdes keeps great records and has an extremely fast-moving FOIA office,” wrote Fahrenthold in an email. “We sent them public-records requests for 1.) Golf taxes, 2.) Wedding permits, and 3.) Filming permits, and got answers back with a couple of weeks on all of them.”

Invisible killers, microscopic fines

In A Pass to Poison, Kiah Collier ties together records requests, data analysis, public databases, and numerous interviews to show how Texas gives a pass to industrial polluters, occasionally slapping them with fines that amount to less than cost of proper prevention would be. Ryan Murphy worked on the data analysis.

Collier said that she ended up filing a lot of “tiny little requests” to fill in the gaps that of of the publicly available data, and the story is a wonderful example of the power of mixing traditional reporting, public records requests, and analysis of public data.

“The TCEQ, whose chairman and head toxicologist openly question the harmful effects of high ozone, says it reviews all of those reports and investigates roughly one-third of them. But state records show that’s usually the end of it.”

In an email, she wrote that organizational tools were helpful for tackling such a complex subject.

“DocumentCloud really saved me on this project because I had to dig through hundreds of unsearchable, scanned (in some cases skewed) PDFs,” she wrote. “DC wasn’t able to make all of them searchable, but enough to where it saved me loads of time. I also kept track of everything in a bunch of spreadsheets that I kept really clean and easy to understand.”

Shifting transparency at the FCC

When questioned about the FCC’s efforts to manage astroturf or automated comments on controversial issues, FCC Chair Ajit Pai had a great soundbite ready: “Generally speaking, this agency has erred on the side of openness.”

The agency’s chief information officer, David Bray, stated in a letter on May 8 that an “analysis” had revealed that the FCC was “subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks,” bringing down the comment site and leaving it inaccessible to the public. Those attacks, Bray said, were “deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host.”

“I’d say the request seemed worth filing immediately because of the agency’s own awkwardness,” wrote Cameron in an email when talking about his strategy with the request. “It was suspect from the beginning because the downtime occurred just as John Oliver was directing people to the website. Logic dictated he was the cause. But then the commission says, ‘it was a DDoS attack,’ and everyone’s like, ‘yeah, sure.’“

In response to his original story, the FCC sent out an unusual and blistering rebuttal:

The FCC has never stated that it lacks any documentation of this DDoS attack itself. And news reports claiming that the Commission has said this are without any basis and completely irresponsible. In fact, we have voluminous documentation of this attack in the form of logs collected by our commercial cloud partners.

What’s more, the records related to Bray’s so-called “analysis” were only one of six categories of material sought. The request further included any agency emails referencing “DDoS,” “astroturfing,” “spam,” and “net neutrality,” in addition to any related calendar entries, visitor logs, meeting minutes, orders, memoranda, or written views concerning the FCC’s comment system. Also requested were all records related to a May 9th letter authored by Senators Wyden and Brian Schatz regarding the attack.

“I tend to want to believe it was a DDoS attack, just because I feel like they couldn’t get that many people in on the lie,” Cameron wrote in response to questions about the rejection. “But they perpetuated all the wild theories by their own total lack of transparency on the topic. If my FOIA had returned just a few more documents, maybe one or two things of substance, I might’ve not seen a story. But because they handed over absolutely NOTHING of value it became a thing. Every single document—every single memo or email or calendar entry about this event really needs to be kept secret? No one buys that.”

And while FOIA rejections can be frustrating, keeping all the documentation and carefully parsing the response led Cameron to not one but two stories that helped raise important questions about what, exactly, was going on at the agency.